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One of our biggest initiatives in the new year is adding support for vanilla Kubernetes in our next generation hosting platform Lagoon. We are not switching away from OpenShift but will support both side by side. When this project is finished developers will be able to choose to create and deploy into an OpenShift or Kubernetes project on Lagoon with no differences in their experience or tools.

Why OpenShift?

People sometimes ask us why we use OpenShift with our container-based hosting platforms. The answer is largely historical, three years ago when we needed an enterprise-grade system there were some advantages of OpenShift over Kubernetes.

The first was that Kubernetes lacked role-based-access-control (RBAC). This was important in the hosting world to ensure the security of our customers. Without it, access to the cluster could mean access to anything on it. Because many of our clients are agencies and we sometimes host specific projects within those agencies, we needed to make sure we could grant specific and secure access.

Similarly, a lack of Network Segregation meant accessing one Drupal project could potentially give access to other Drupal projects, making multiple projects vulnerable to attacks if one was compromised.

At the time of our original decision, these two features weren’t available in Kubernetes but were in OpenShift. In addition, Openshift offered support and maintenance through RedHat, making it a better choice for our professional offering.

But things change quickly in the hosting world, more quickly even in the past year than the past decade. Kubernetes now offers all the functionality that was lacking before and is supported as standard with many of the largest infrastructure companies including AWS, Azure, and Google.

Why Now?

In addition to Kubernetes offering the features that enable us to host securely with them, we are now technically able to offer these two options side by side. We are also working on this in response to numerous requests of people who want to use Lagoon with Kubernetes. We want to make this offering available to our clients, especially the ones that already have systems and initiatives that use Kubernetes.

We are confident that with the changes in support and widespread use of Kubernetes we can offer this at no additional cost to clients, so they can choose the option that works best for them.

Beyond that, we are also passionate about the open source aspect of Lagoon and realize that it can be used and adapted much more extensively with Kubernetes support. We can’t wait to see what new things people build and contribute with Lagoon as it grows into a more widely usable form.

When will things change?

We are already hard at work on this project and estimate that it will be finished in the next three to six months.

We have support from our clients and partners, including dedicated time and test sites from the awesome team at Microsoft, to make available to all of our clients and contribute our work back to Lagoon so the entire community can benefit from it.

You can follow the details of this project, as well as make suggestions and ask questions in this GitHub issue. We would love to hear from you as we work on this. Please feel free to get in touch through Github or by emailing amazee.ioor me personally.

What will change?

From a developers perspective, nothing will change. There will be no need to migrate or update projects or learn a new system. We have designed a way to make sure that everything will run identically and seamlessly for teams deploying into OpenShift or Kubernetes.

Developers deploying a Drupal site will have the same experience and advantages of deploying in Lagoon weather they are deploying into OpenShift or Kubernetes.

While this involves a little more work to make sure everything is congruent, we understand the importance of it. As hosting changes we want to make sure that we empower clients and Lagoon users to have access to all the advantages of using latest tools and features, without the disadvantages of having to relearn processes or overhaul existing projects.

We’re excited about the future of Lagoon and Kubernetes in 2019 and beyond.